Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com) [LWN.net]

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 10, 2008 23:14 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com) by jospoortvliet
Parent article: Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

I don't know if you remember, but back in the day KDE 1.x was not free software (whether or not you wanted to develop 'commercial' applications for it) because Qt was not free software. Nowadays Qt is available under the GNU GPL or a proprietary for-money licence, but back then it was always non-free, though you could use it without paying money if your own source code was free software. This was one motivation for making GNOME, though certainly not the only one.

FWIW, large bits of Mono like the compiler are MIT / X11 licensed.

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Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 11, 2008 8:05 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

I know Qt wasn't GPL back then, but they were working on that. I can see how it takes a while for a company to make their source GPL. Either way, it's considered a huge advantage for the Gnome libs that they are LGPL - clearly the Gnome community has changed their minds, or at least Miguel has.

And no matter what Miguel is telling everyone, I don't think you can seriously argue Microsoft is a better company to work with than Trolltech has been in the last years - or Nokia now, for that matter.

The situation might be a bit more complex as I portrayed it in my first comment. True. Yet, the game has clearly changed - the KDE community and infrastructure are much more about Freedom than Gnome is these days. And that's not just Mono, but everything - ODF vs OpenXML, the influence of big companies in development. Anyway, that's how I feel about it - it's not a hard fact, I suppose. Even if I'm not alone in thinking along these lines.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 10:33 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

I think You are missing the point entirely.

Mono is Free Software, period.
For everybody.
Just like Gnome and KDE and now QT, and this is what really matters for everyone.

That said, there are people interested in using Mono in particular environments where releasing the framework as Free Software is not an option (like game consoles). More generally, there are also people that want to include Mono in their products, but want to do so without the restrictions imposed by the LGPL license (they want to link it statically or anyway in a non-replaceable way and not share their code, typical for games and in the embedded space).

For these people, Novell provides a commercial license, while maintaining the framework Free Software for everybody.

What's wrong with this?

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 12:17 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

Nothing's wrong with that - that wasn't my point at all. But I didn't see Mono is LGPL, I thought it now was GPL so commercial users had to pay Novell... That was why I was kind'a surprised.

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 15:25 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Ah, ok... BTW, sorry if I sounded rude.
I did not want to.

To clarify the licensing issue, different parts of Mono are distributed with different licenses, but the intended effect is that everybody can use it freely (and gratis) for any purpose, in "most" situations. To obtain that effect, the licenses are the following:

The runtime (the VM, JIT and so on) is LGPL. This means that anybody can use it to run any application, and that anybody can also "embed" it into their applications if they obey to the LGPL (otherwise they should ask for a commercial license). This "embedding" of Mono is done by linking the runtime into the application as permitted by the LGPL, and can be useful more or less as it can be useful embedding Python or other runtime frameworks, with the obvious technical differences (JIT compiler, supported languages...).
The class libraries are generally under the MIT X11 license, so they can be taken and used everywhere with no restrictions. For instance, we know that the Mono XML libraries have been used in commercial applications running on the .NET Compact framework (which lacks good XML support), and we are fine with that.
Finally most tools are released under the GPL license, but we are in the process of relicensing some of them under the LGPL or MIT X11. As an example, there's the C# compiler: historically it made sense to release it under the GPL (it is a compiler after all!), but now that we see that there's value in embedding the compiler in other places (we are also doing it ourselves), we think a more permissive license is better.

So, the whole story is more complex that saying "Mono uses license X", but the spirit is easy to understand: "protecting" the core with the LGPL, and being extremely permissive with the rest.

Have fun!
Massimiliano

Interview: Miguel de Icaza (DesktopLinux.com)

Posted Oct 16, 2008 17:28 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

Ok, I had a look at the page, and your explanation makes sense. I guess it doesn't help with the patent/MS thing, but the code is as free as it gets. Personally I'd actually prefer it being GPL, as that would ensure the code will STAY free including apps build upon it. But LGPL/BSD etc are Free Software just as well...